Suzuki Sampler: Piano

Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Piano (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The piano lesson was a little more stressful than yesterday’s cello lesson, in part because we have a few toy and electric piano keyboards around the house. While playing with the cello, and even smelling it, was a new and exotic sensation,…

Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere

In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a…

What Corrupted Me

I’d try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn’t work very well, so I’d have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. And this is how I was…

Reading at Risk from Library – um, I mean Internet

Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, writes in his preface to this report: Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted — our society‘smassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. — most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio…

The Infocom Adventure

The first adventure game was called Adventure and ran on IBM mainframes. It became known as Colossal Caves or The Hobbit, and was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. —Theo Clarke —The Infocom Adventure (Strategy Plus) The Hobbit? WTF? A transcription from a book, the full publication data of which is not given. See my “Colossal Cave…

Art Treasures in Philly Schools

“Art often gets taken down when the school is painted and they don’t get put up again. So many valuable and important works were forgotten in boiler rooms, locked closets, bicycle rooms,” Bernhardt-Hidvegi said. […] “We went through every building, every classroom, every basement, every boiler room, every closet, and under every stage” in Philadelphia’s…

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs

Weblogging is no panacea for writing instruction, nor for engendering greater course participation among students. But our initial study has convinced us that weblogging as a general writing activity is worth pursuing in college courses, and that understanding the wide range of generic knowledge students bring to weblogging will help instructors orient and motivate students…

Clear Water Costly For Small Towns

Minnesota communities outside the Twin Cities area have an immediate need for $6.9 billion worth of wastewater treatment, drinking water and storm sewer facilities, according to a report by West Central Initiative, a regional foundation based in Fergus Falls. “If, all of a sudden, you can’t flush your toilet, your house isn’t worth anything,” said…